A Study Of College Students' Learning Strategies In CALL Environment

With an ever-expanding demand for international communication, increasing attention has been paid to foreign language learning. Stimulated by the recent development in the research area of second language acquisition both in China and abroad, the author, by means of a questionnaire, conducted a survey of the application of learning strategies with 309 non-English majors of Grade 2002 in the University of Electronic Science and Technology (UESTC). The main purpose was to learn how frequently and effectively the college students employ the learning strategies, and whether the successful students and the less successful students use the learning strategies in an different way, so as to find an effective method to carry out the instruction of learning strategies for college students.Meanwhile, the rapid development of computer technology in the past decades opens up a way to CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning), which can be defined as the search for and study of the computer in language teaching and learning. One of the ideas that are currently gaining ground with regard to CALL is that as a revolution in language instruction, CALL has brought us a lot of benefits; despite the inherent limitations of the current technology. Therefore, the author also made in the questionnaire a survey of the college students' perceptions of CALL, in the hope that, with the help of the technological advantages of CALL and the rich on-line information resources via computers, the instruction of the learning strategies could be carried out in a more effective and convenient way.The results of statistical analysis revealed that the performance of the sampled students in the application of learning strategies was rather poor, especially of the affective and social strategies. Besides, there existed certain differences between the successful students and the less successful students in the strategy application. The results also indicated that the majority of the students hold a positive attitude towardCALL application in language teaching and learning, though they reported some weaknesses of CALL.Based on the results, the author made some pedagogical suggestions on the instruction of the learning strategies in CALL environment. In particular, the strategy training model integrated with CALL is recommended for language teachers' consideration.